@jenius if we're already using jade and webpack on a "classic roots" site, which is very large and takes over 15 mins to build, would you say that moving to roots-mini would bring a quicker build? From the blog post I got the idea that speed was one of your main aims with roots-mini, along with easier maintenance, but I don't know if I've got the wrong end of the stick? Does roots-mini bring better jade performance?

but the compilers we use are the compilers we use, we did not rewrite them

switching off of stylus will be a large speed boost

basically roots is extremely fast, but is throttled by the speed of the compilers

the only way to get a speed boost is to use faster compiled languages

generally stylus is by far the slowest one, jade and coffee are pretty quick

roots-mini tracks dependencies and in development only reloads changed files though, while roots does not do this because it supports a shitload of different compilers and not all of them return dependency trees

so in development you will have millsecond-speed reloads just about all the time

roots-mini is not stable at all though, and we release breaking changes regularly, so you should know this before thinking about a change

when it's slightly more stable we will release 0.1.0 and probably update the name to something nicer

Ok thanks very much, I thought that would be the case but I wanted to clarify. We're not using stylus. I'm pretty certain that the bottleneck is jade, but we are asking it to compile thousands of pages...!

The long build actually is not so bad except it's hitting th netlify 15 minute limit. We can pay to extend it though so that will probably be the solution. I will take a look at your multi-process commit and see if I have any ideas. Cheers.

Thanks! I will report back. By the way, when I said about micro-optimizations, the biggest speed boost was passing in lazy.js as a jade local function and using that to loop through stuff instead of standard js array methods.

Also caching some big arrays between files, rather than creating them anew in each file, by saving them to a jade local from within the jade template